8
BAMOS
Mar 2020
Conference report
American Meteorological
Annual Meeting
Society
Damien Irving
Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales
Email: [email protected]
For a long time now, my academic bucket list has had three big
US conferences on it: the American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Fall Meeting, Ocean Sciences and the American Meteorological
Society (AMS) Annual Meeting. I knocked off the first two in 2016
and 2018 respectively, and earlier this year I was lucky enough
to complete the set when I jetted off for the 100th edition of the
AMS Annual Meeting in Boston.
As if knowing 5,500 weather nerds would be descending on the
city, an anomalous southerly flow produced Boston’s warmest
January day on record (74 °F, approximately 23 °C) on the eve
of conference. I’d been warned to pack my winter woollies, but I
spent the afternoon walking the iconic Freedom Trail in a t‑shirt!
Things quickly returned to normal the next day (a high of 39 °F,
approximately 4 °C) and it was time to get down to business.
The first thing that strikes you at an AMS Annual Meeting is the
sheer size of the weather industry in the US. Along with the usual
collection of government agencies and university departments,
the exhibition hall was filled with weather intelligence
companies, equipment manufacturers and defence contractors.
The conference program is also somewhat unique, in that it is
essentially a whole bunch of mini conferences happening at
the same time. I presented in the “12th Symposium on Aerosol‑
Cloud‑Climate Interactions” and “10th Symposium on Advances
in Modeling and Analysis Using Python” and there were forty
or so other conferences and symposia hosted over the course
of the week by various different AMS Boards and Committees.